


Delete

by discombobulate



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Drugs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-13
Updated: 2011-10-13
Packaged: 2017-10-24 14:21:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/264474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/discombobulate/pseuds/discombobulate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock struggles, but he's not entirely sure why</p>
            </blockquote>





	Delete

Sherlock Holmes lays where he’s always laid; gangly limbs overflowing across the narrow leather couch, hands clasped in a mocking prayer’s pose and eyes wide open. He feels at once smaller than a single atom and entirely too large for his wiry frame.

Although you wouldn’t think it from the time-stopping silence of the flat, the roaring of Sherlock’s mind bangs and shrieks and whispers obtrusively, right up into the frayed edges of his brain.

Languidly, he appraises the items in the flat with a jeweller’s eye, the thin, spindly chemistry equipment, full of stale potions left untouched for – god it must be _months_ now – when Sherlock had grown at once bored with each and every one of them (even the one involving the dissolving femur bone, which had been utterly hellish to obtain in the first place). The various artefacts that are strewn across the living area glow amber in the dying sunlight, and when his eye catches like a fly on a web on a chipped mug, still half-full of tea (splash of milk, one sugar, always) the wandering sense of enormity that had been swelling within snaps like a violin string, and he feels himself shrink, wither back into himself.

Sherlock huffs a sigh, and turns his head back to face the ceiling.

Slowly.

It took effort in this state to fucking _breathe_ , exhalations dragged roughly from his lungs every half-minute or so. It’s _frustrating_.

Usually, when he felt the darkness creeping into his mind like a particularly vicious tarantula, he’d perhaps be a touch more acrid with his words, a little more... savage with the idiots who infested his eternal orbit of London. And he pushed and pushed for a couple of days until he jointed himself back together, and felt composed, able to stay there comfortably in the quiet surface of his brain and ignore the screaming that lurked below.

(He’d long since learned that no amount of effort ever got rid of that.)

And now he was bored and drowning in his own lethargy and John wasn’t even answering his texts, the git.

Ahh, John. John. That was something that could stave off at least a little of it. At least until he could be bothered to reach under that one floorboard that John had never found and burn his veins with coke.

(John was like dry, hot earth - not beautiful, but weathered and ragged but reassuringly practical.

Clever.

Not in the poncy public-school way, like snotty old Mycroft: more a sort of quiet certainty in his knowledge and skills.

His palms were like charred oak, dry and somewhat rough to touch, but steady (without that blasted tremor) and tight when he pulled on Sherlock’s cock.

John looked best on rainy days, when the pale of the streetlights outside caught _just so_ against the cleaved marks on his face. His darkened blue eyes reflected rain water like they were created just for that.)

A curious ache stabbed it’s way at the base of Sherlock’s skull, so he stopped his line of thought in its tracks and thought of nothing but radio static for a moment, listening: yes, it disappeared as soon as he stopped thinking about John.

He went with it and sank helplessly without anything to anchor his whirling thoughts.

***

It had not taken him too long to dig out sweet white relief, all things considered. He supposes perhaps he had a little more backbone in him once upon a time, but needs must.

He was filled to the brim with jittery adrenaline, and his knuckles clench against the filthy, ruined silk of his blue robe again and again. He picks up a couple of the experiments that were able to be salvaged, completely bypassing the ones that smelled offensive. John could clean those up when he came home. He’d complain, but he always does it in the end, even if it means a couple of days’ worth of the cold shoulder and pointed remarks.

The evening passes in a haze of luxurious cigarette smoke, drifting around the room in a bluish haze, smelling like home and wooden floors and father’s old study room. John will go ballistic, but christ, Sherlock is dying for a smoke.

John, his mind keens so suddenly, so vividly, that Sherlock sits up from his crouch on the sofa rapidly enough to make his head spin. He is bemused as he presses reed-thin fingers to his breastbone, the muscles inside clenching and burning in an unpleasant fashion. He sneers at himself, even as his heart feels like its being pulled flush against his ribs and pulls out his phone.

 **Inbox: 1**

His heart pounds sickeningly, and he is profoundly disappointed to find a queer, cryptic text from Mycroft.

 **Come now, little brother, you can’t mope about like this for much longer. You are trying my patience.**

 **MH**

He fires back an obligatory “Piss off”, but it looks half-hearted even to his own eyes.

Then, he sends another text, this one to John.

 **If you’re going to waste your after-work hours in the pub, at least pick us up some milk on your way home.**

 **SH**

It irritates him when he gets no response, yet again.

Of course, John was at the surgery today - that idiotic new rule in the practise regarding the switching off of mobile phones was most inconvenient, more and more nowadays John completely forgot about turning it back on. It infuriated Sherlock to no end, what if he required assistance on a case and John was stuck minding to some bunged up child who didn’t know the meaning of vitamin D?

 **And some hobnobs too**

 **SH**

They were John’s favourite.

The cocaine was wearing off now, and he felt the crash bubble up within him, the slow descent into agony that would be slept off in a marathon 15-hour sleep. Tangled in his own bed until it reeked with night sweat and his joints ached from being unmoving for so long.

And maybe this time John wouldn’t look at him with that slow, smoulderingly sad look when he woke up. Maybe he’d take Sherlock gently, right there in the rumpled sheets. Maybe he’d smile in that way that used to make the creases in the corners of his eyes spread like birds’ wings.

Maybe he wouldn’t turn around and stalk off and cover the flat with those accursed cardboard boxes.

Maybe this time he'd stay.

***

His phone buzzes beside his long-fingered, useless, trembling hand and Sherlock snatches it up immediately.

 **Inbox: 1**

 **It’s been 3 months. Leave me alone, Sherlock i cant**

And that’s all Sherlock remembers before he whites out.

When he returns to himself, his face aflame with fury, the phone’s screen splintered and blank, he tosses himself back into the hollow made in the sofa.

And with all the time in the world in his hands, his nights once more free and long without a certain person to nag him into wasteful sleep, he grits his teeth and

The process of deletion takes four full days.


End file.
